Alabama

Some choose to make their hearing aids fashion accessories

Rather than hiding the devices, some hearing aid wearers are adding 'bling.' (The Birmingham News/Michelle Campbell)

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- If you listen to the marketing claims, invisibility seems to be the best thing about the new generation of hearing aids.

In fact, that has been a selling point since the early days of the devices. “No tell-tale button in the ear ... Nothing — not even the cord shows,” reads one advertisement from the 1950s.

But one group of hearing aid wearers has taken a different approach. Instead of trying to hide their hearing aids, they’re calling attention to the devices they wear by dressing them up with brightly colored sleeves and dangling jewelry.

Call it bling for the hard of hearing.

That’s how Netagene Kirkpatrick, a Birmingham resident who got her hearing aids in 2005, approaches it. She’s gotten hooked on ear charms — dangly, earring-like baubles that hang from the wires of her hearing aids — as well as ear sleeves that protect the expensive equipment.

“I’m not embarrassed,” said Kirkpatrick. “Almost everyone, at some stage of life, will probably lose some of their hearing.”

There’s a range of ways to decorate devices, many of them aimed at children. Some have a practical edge: for example, Ear Gear makes brightly-colored nylon sleeves that not only dress up hearing aids but protect them from rain, sweat, dust and dirt. Animal-shaped clips attach the aids to a shirt to keep them from getting lost.

Netagene Kirkpatrick shows off some of her hearing aid charms at her home in Birmingham, Ala. (The Birmingham News / Michelle Campbell)

But they have another purpose, too, according to Elizabeth Boschini, a speech-language pathologist who blogs at Cochlear Implant Online. “It’s time to combat society’s negative attitudes toward assistive listening devices and show pride in hearing aids and cochlear implants,” she wrote in a blog post recommending a slew of devices.

Beyond dangly charms, there are plastic shapes to clip onto the top of tubes and coils that wrap around them. Manufacturers offer brightly colored or custom-made versions of the earmolds that sit outside the ear to augment traditional behind-the-ear hearing aids. And one German design firm even came up with a prototype of a hearing aid that uses a microphone hidden inside the type of ring worn in a stretched-out earlobe, a look popular with an edgy, young crowd.

“Wear your hearing aid like a piece of jewelry, a stylish accessory,” the group’s website reads in the promo for the prototype product, which probably has a limited market. “Be individual, be cool, be yourself.”

People don’t balk at wearing colorful or even jewel-encrusted glasses, Kirkpatrick argues — and those are nothing but aids for eyes. Earware is just the same.

“If you don’t wear a hearing aid, people are going to know you’re hard of hearing,” Kirkpatrick said. “Vanity, I’m sure, is a big part of it. I’d rather say, ‘Look, I wear a hearing aid, so you’ve got to face me.”